How does he do it? Even as Kore pokes at him, daring him to match her impulsivity, his words come to her evenly measured, each one laid carefully at her hooves. She still hates it. Her whole body trembles with the rage that holds her in its vice like grip. The small mare follows his gaze, scowling, to the distant forms of the many others who’d also come to call the Dunes home since her arrival in Spring, and snorts with indignation. She wants to interrupt him, but by sheer force of will she manages to keep herself quiet and let him say his piece, however hard she chafes against it.

The longer he goes on, though, the more difficult it is. She can hardly focus on the emotion he does show, so strong are the ones he provokes in her. Her eyes, nearly black at this point, narrow to slits, and the borders of her vision go fuzzy with the frames of her dark lashes so close around them. He finishes - or at least seems to pause long enough to try and move towards her again - and she seizes the opportunity, her voice coming in a low growl through her tightly-clenched jaw.

”Enough.”

Slowly, her dished head turns from the horizon. She glowers at him, animalistic, like a starved beast sizing up a meal. Kore is lost to the tide of her instincts, a mare possessed. “If you really care so much about me, Maslakhat, you’re terrible at showing it,” she answers, her tones eerily calm for the burning aura surrounding her. “Why do I have to find you myself? Why me, when you seem to have no problems seeking out your other mares? I see the results of your attention growing in their stomachs,” she spits. As she continues, her voice climbs higher, the frozen calm melting away to scalding fury. Kore raises the hind leg furthest from him and drives it forcefully into the sand, trying to ease her discomfort and failing miserably. “None of them,” she says, gesturing with a sharp point of her muzzle to the others below, “have tried to know me, either.” Save for the white-nosed Ak Burun, she hasn’t met a single one of the myriad newcomers. Neither has Kore sought them out, and during the breeding season had actively avoided them, but the street goes both ways. ”They aren’t the ones who brought me here.” And anyway, she thinks, they can probably sense that I’m not worthy of their time. Perhaps it is not that everyone here is selfish; perhaps it is that the dark bay is rotting from the inside out, and they can tell, and rightfully steer clear so that whatever pestilence festers within and consumes her to the core doesn’t settle in them, too.

Something else the ‘Teke has said nags at her. “Do you think I’m lying to you?” she says, rapidly changing the subject. “About what happened down there, on the beach?” Kore raises her head to its full height, peering at him through the dark tangles of her forelock.

“I spoke the truth to you. You’d know if you bothered to notice,” she says, her voice rising with every syllable. “The whole time I’ve been here, I have hid nothing from you. You just never looked!” Of course, she hadn’t been exactly forthcoming with information, but it is one thing to spin around prying questions and another entirely to lie.

Kore’s nearly shouting at this point. Her ears disappear again into her mane, and her small frame jostles beside him, bursting at the seams with anger. She cannot take it anymore, and with a squeal she is swinging her hips in a wide arc away from him, kicking out with both of her back legs at empty air. She is so spent, so done with trying to control herself, to keep the poison in, and she surrenders to the whims of her heart and her broken soul, giving herself to them until they toss her, sweating and gasping for breath, back onto her own four hooves. Kore stands, motionless but for the heaving of her chest, for a long moment, her face shielded in the curtains of her coal-black mane. When she can finally stand to look at him, tears stream in thick tracks down her delicate face.

“You think I deserve this?” she asks, her voice trembling in her throat. It comes, now, hard and strong, loud enough to scratch at the back of her throat and backed with the force of all of the self-loathing and pure, wretched hatred held inside her tiny body. “You’re WRONG!”

They were all wrong. Maslakhat, Ak Burun, Aidoneus… all of them, every last one, and it was nobody’s fault but hers.